HarperCollins India presents No Holds Barred: My Years In Politics by Narayan Rane with Priyam Gandhi-Mody

NO HOLDS BARRED

My Years In Politics

by

Narayan Rane

with Priyam Gandhi-Mody

Releasing on 6 May 2019

A candid and fearless tell-all that exposes the true nature of India’s corridors of power

Early in 1999, when Shiv Sena chief Balasaheb Thackeray decided to instal a new chief minister in Maharashtra, he was asked who the man of his choice was. ‘New CM? Narayan Rane,’ he replied, as though the question need not even have arisen. His pick was a mass leader who had first caught his attention as a teenager in a Mumbai suburb when Thackeray had just started his party in the 1960s.

The committed Shiv Sainik with close access to the supremo, however, stormed out of the party and joined the Congress in 2005. In the years that followed, he was a powerful fixture in the cabinet of one of India’s most politically significant states – always with a fighting chance of making a comeback as chief minister, and perennially holding out an existential threat not only to his one-time bosses in the Shiv Sena but also the leaders of his own party. Today, having broken from the Congress too and been elected to the Rajya Sabha on a Bharatiya Janata Party nomination, he remains as unpredictable and aggressive as ever.

In No Holds Barred, Narayan Rane looks back on the years he has spent in the dog-eat-dog world of Indian politics. Packed with revealing stories of his encounters with the who’s who of the game in Maharashtra and at the Centre – ranging from the Thackerays, Pramod Mahajan, Gopinath Munde, Manohar Joshi, Vilasrao Deshmukh, Ashok Chavan and Devendra Fadnavis to Sharad Pawar, Ahmed Patel and Rahul and Sonia Gandhi – this is a truly candid and fearless tell-all that exposes the true nature of India’s corridors of power.

NARAYAN RANE was Chief Minister of Maharashtra from 1 February to 17 October 1999 as a member of the Shiv Sena and the leader of a Sena–BJP alliance. He was then the Leader of Opposition in the state from 1999 to 2005. He subsequently joined the Congress and held the revenue, industry, port and employment portfolios in the state cabinet. He was a member of the Maharashtra Legislative Council from 2016 to 2017, when he formed his own party, the Maharashtra Swabhiman Paksha, and was elected to the Rajya Sabha on a BJP nomination in 2018. Born in 1952, Narayan Rane hails from the Konkan and represented the region as a member of the Maharashtra legislative assembly from 1990 to 2014.

PRIYAM GANDHI-MODY is a strategist specializing in advocacy and political brand building.